I was intrigued this morning about something that was written at SSM’s blog. that linked to a comment at Zippy’s. For it links to a conversation the son and I had yesterday, while walking along a beach. About why societies fail, why their birth rate implodes, and what is the role of those accounted as righteous.

Some time ago, I was speculating about the advantage Leftism has because from having won over so many pretty girls. “Communist sex appeal”, I called it , but I never explained it. Thanks to you guys, I now see that I had it backwards. Right-wingers are not low status because chicks don’t like us; chicks don’t like us because Christianity is low status. It’s all very simple, really. If I had realized that women were attracted by social cues (a bizarre thought for me as a man: I certainly don’t feel attracted to women based on their status over other women), there would have been no mystery at all.

For these people are often accounted by this world as low status.

Women are also more apt to buy into the idea that reality is socially constructed. That’s because for them reality actually is socially constructed to a greater extent than it is for men.

Men worry about how to defend the village from the bear. Women worry about how to encourage and help the men defend the village from the bear.

In the manosphere this elementary bit of complementarity of the sexes is referred to as “the feminine imperative,” frequently with a nice helping of self-congratulatory disdain.

It’s low status among non-Christians, certainly. As a Protestant, I am probably not allowed to get to into the weeds of Who’s A Real Christian, but most people in church aren’t Christian, and most outside of church aren’t either.

More to the point, a lot of men are utterly desperate to be led, and will follow any master, and this is a big, big problem, because a lot of “masters” these days lead without taking responsibility for their charges.

Well, yes. The trouble is that God does not really care about who is winning the social display. He cares about what is right and true. So at this point we will skip lightly down the “third rail of offense” to a part of Genesis, where a society that had institutionalized inequality (the prophets said the sin of the Sodomite women was a love of luxury) and militant homosexualism — that could have been saved if there were 10 righteous men in it. There was one, and he was a sorry specimen called Lot.

Genesis 18:16-33

¹⁶Then the men set out from there, and they looked toward Sodom; and Abraham went with them to set them on their way. ¹⁷The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, ¹⁸seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? ¹⁹No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” ²⁰Then the LORD said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! ²¹I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know.”

²²So the men turned from there, and went toward Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the LORD. ²³Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? ²⁴Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? ²⁵Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” ²⁶And the LORD said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” ²⁷Abraham answered, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. ²⁸Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” ²⁹Again he spoke to him, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” ³⁰Then he said, “Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” ³¹He said, “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” ³²Then he said, “Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” ³³And the LORD went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham; and Abraham returned to his place.

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

¹⁸For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
²⁰Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

²⁶Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, ²⁹so that no one might boast in the presence of God. ³⁰He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, ³¹in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

We need to teach on this. The world will not call us successful: there will always be someone who will cheat, steal and manipulate to get success. If you do not believe it, consider any reality show: because it is a “game” people consider “if you are cheating you are not trying”.

But life is not a game.

So what should we do as men? Well, we need to not do what Zippy was suggesting and use Islam as a toolkit, in the same way that we should not use the PUA as a exemplar of how to behave around women.

For we should not measure our success by the number of women we seduce, (or the quality of those women), or our job, or how society praises us. That is not the measure. The product of our lives is.

Galatians 5:13-25

¹³For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. ¹⁴For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁵If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. ¹⁶Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. ¹⁷For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. ¹⁸But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. ¹⁹Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, ²⁰idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, ²¹envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

²²By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. ²⁴And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. ²⁵If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.

So what do we do now?

Confront wrong teaching. The modern Church has been poisoned by the culture it is in: and in a sense of hyperspirituality has decided to tell men that they are stupid to want that which Paul directed their wives to do. This preacher is a fool when he teaches this, for he misses the issues around human desire, how men are attracted to the visual and women to what is snarkily called the feminine imperative. Instead of teaching us to resist our urges and learn self control, he waffles and places women on a pedestal.

I mean that a husband owes his wife the confidence, affection, and emotional support that would lead her to freely give herself to her husband in the act of sex.

God’s gift of sexuality is inherently designed to pull us out of ourselves and toward our spouse. For men, this means that marriage calls us out of our self-focused concern for genital pleasure and toward the totality of the sex act within the marital relationship.

Put most bluntly, I believe that God means for a man to be civilized, directed, and stimulated toward marital faithfulness by the fact that his wife will freely give herself to him sexually only when he presents himself as worthy of her attention and desire.

The preacher is a fool. His teaching was shredded by those who know scripture, and have reflected on their lives. Earl will do: he is reflecting the teaching in I Corinthians.

“his wife will freely give herself to him sexually only when he presents himself as worthy of her attention and desire.”

Which is in direct opposition to scripture which states a husband’s body is the property of the wife and the wife’s body is property of the husband. There is no strings attached to that based off morality, how much he makes, whether he’s a tingle inducer, or buys her the correct things. What God has joined together…let no man separate.

These “Christian” leaders are doing just as fine of job separating spouses as the government is.

Be realisitic about our sinfulness. Most of us are built with a want, a desire, to love: infatuation, desire are part of our makeup. But we need to control these tendencies and do our duty. Which is around being faithful to each other. We forget that Paul was writing to Corinth, and Corinth was the ancient equivalent of Vegas crossed with San Francisco. His advice was that those who are naturally continent should be single, but those of us who burn should marry, and exercise their lusts in the marital bed. For a Christian who is married, the default answer to “How about it?” is ?What took you so long?” (or, in other words, Yes). Unless both agree otherwise for a period….

For what we have done in the church is that we have made that which should be earthy, fun, and occuring in a faithful and holy marriage fraught with danger. Men are concerned that they will be destroyed by the person they married: one of the reason they turn to their computer screens is that it is safer that getting in front of the family court.

As a Christian, I was told to be myself, stick to sexual morality, and work hard.

All of the girls rejected me while young, I married a single mother just like my preacher said, she divorced me and took most of my money in alimony and child support, and I died abandoned after the ex used the rumor mill against me. All advised as the life path of Christian success. There is a word for this: betrayal.

Think about this…does betrayal come from God?

Most men do risk assessment quite well, thank you very much, which is why most of us stay out of jail, for we (in this fallen world) break the multiple laws of this land daily. (The laws often contradict themselves, so you are felonious regardless of what you do). And within the church we have a duty to each other, to encourage good works and to train ourselves in righteousness.

Not to accede to the ideas of this world, to deny people mercy when they have been betrayed and fallen. For parts of the church have fallen into the error of Novatus, and deny forgiveness.

God help them, for Christ does not.